Russell Pearce On The Effectiveness Of SB 1070

Last week, the Department of Homeland Security released their statistics on the illegal immigration for 2010. According to DHS, the total illegal population went down less than 1%, from 11.6 million at the beginning of the year to 11.5 million by the end. However, in the state of Arizona, the illegal population declined from 470,000 to 360,000; a decline of 23%. In April of 2010 the Arizona legislature passed SB 1070 to crack down on illegal immigration in the state. While parts of the law were blocked by a federal judge, illegal aliens in Arizona are getting the message that they are not welcome and left.

Opponents of SB 1070 recognize this. Also last week, the Supreme Court published the amicus brief it received from 11 Democratic Attorney Generals from states including Massachusetts, California, Illinois, and New York in opposition to SB 1070. Many of these states enacted sanctuary policies that forbid local law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration authorities, even when illegal aliens are convicted of serious crimes. Not surprisingly illegal immigrants are attracted to these states, so they complain that “SB 1070’s provisions have the primary effect of redirecting undocumented immigrants to other States.”

If that’s true, then residents of these sanctuary states should be furious at their politicians for making their states a magnet for illegal immigration, not at Arizona.

That being said, many of the illegal immigrants are leaving Arizona to their country of origin. While the declining in illegal population was most dramatic in 2010, the illegal population has fallen by 200,000 when Arizona enacted the Legal Arizona Workers Act to crack down on employers of illegal immigrants. After the law went into effect legislators from the Mexican border province of Sonora complained that they could not handle all the illegal aliens returning! [More]